Reads and Zines with Fabian Wolf’s Death Lost His Bones in a Blind Alley

Fabian Wolf is a designer at Kingdrips, an independent design studio based in Hamburg St. Pauli, Germany, who recently turned to illustration. The 104 paged book looks into 24 stories from our real and imagined past. As Wolf describes the project,

“I have always had interests in presenting a world from the perspective of mankind, which finds its setting far back in a time that actually seems strange and fantastic for us as viewers. The social conflicts and fears at the time of the Middle Ages are very important to me. Legends and demons have always accompanied the history of mankind and in the Middle Ages they dominated everyday life. In the stories that are depicted in the book, I refer to real historical events and myths, which have been handed down to the present.”

Wolf’s illustrations and writings have a raw look to them that adds to the spookiness of the stories. To see more of the book, click here. 

- Lee Jones

Unicorns: Early Scientific Illustrations of A Mythical Creature

Unicorns: we love them! So did early scientists and their illustrators. These drawings – dated from the 15^th to the 18^th centuries – are examples of how myth and science were inextricably linked before more stringent research standards were imposed on Europe’s scientists. This made for some very detailed renderings of the elusive quadruped. But the search certainly did not stop there. This guy still believes. In 2009, The Guardian thought it was an argument worth investigating. Are you a believer?

 All images from Strange Science.

- Erin Saunders

Tania Kovats

These sculptures by Tania Kovats draw from geography as an historical record. Her works take on the appearance of sections of the earth, extracted from their origins and constructed with both scientific and artistic precision. Paradoxically both abstract and accurate, these various geo-projects are Kovats’ own interpretations of the landscape genre. As the artist describes,

“The landscapes that interest me the most are geologically explicit landscapes where you can clearly read the narrative of formation or erosion. This leads me to landscapes that are often remote – cliff edges, deserts, odd geological incidents… The way our experience of landscape is culturally mediated is of central concern to me. Much of my thinking over the last few years has meant I have looked to geology to help read landscape to further understand how landscapes are made outside of what we affect upon them. No landform exists forever but only within a particular time span in the earth’s history. I see landscape as a series of incidents coming into being.”

See more of Kovats’s land projects here, here, and here.

And, “Is Geography the New History?” – a 2009 article in the Economist.

- Erin Saunders